Touring the Calculus Gallery

Summary: Provides a glimpse of the development of calculus/analysis from its appearance in the late seventeenth century, through its expansion in the eighteenth, to its "Classical Period" in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth, and on to the mature subject of today.

About the Author: [from The American Mathematical Monthly, (2005)] William Dunham received his B.S. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969 and his Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 1974. He is currently the Truman Koehler Professor of Mathematics at Muhlenberg College. In the 1990s he wrote three books—Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics (Wiley, 1990), The Mathematical Universe (Wiley, 1994), and Euler: The Master of Us All (MAA, 1999)—and in the present millennium he authored a fourth, The Calculus Gallery: Masterpieces from Newton to Lebesgue (Princeton, 2005), of which this article samples a tiny portion.